My 30 Personal Favourite Films

Sad to say, I have been too busy recently to write for Elan. However, I managed one idle afternoon this past week to take stock of all the wonderful (and, in some cases, less than wonderful) films I've seen over the years. Film is something I've taken quite seriously since the age of sixteen, when my friends and I took the bold step of founding our own film club of sorts. We called it Cult Movie Night and held it normally on Friday evenings back in my hometown of Burlington, Ontario.

It wasn't long, however, before we found ourselves viewing more than mere 'cult films.' Soon, we were watching a wide range of great films, at first primarily American, but eventually European ones also. Several of my best friends at the time attempted to create their own films, often as creative projects for high school English classes. We also took to seeing new and classic foreign films at the Broadway Cinema, then Hamilton's premier art house theatre, which doubled at the time as the city's most stimulating art gallery.

Shortly after completing high school I embarked on a personal study of the history of film, inspired especially by a list of great films passed down to me by a friend's older brother, who for several years had aspired to become the next Al Pacino.

And I have been going out of my way to watch great films ever since.

So, without further ado, here is an alphabetical list of my sixty personal favourite films, including their titles, directors, and year of release. Most of my choices I would assume others might support as well, though there are no doubt films in my list whose virtues are peculiar to my own personal tastes. Nevertheless ... happy reading, and, perhaps, as well, happy viewing ...

My 30 Personal Favourite Films

-American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)
-Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
-Baraka (Ron Fricke, 1992)
-Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
-The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)
-Che (Steven Soderberg, 2008)
-Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee 2000)
-Cyrano de Bergerac (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1990)
-Dead Poet's Society (Peter Weir, 1989)
-The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
-Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
-8 and a Half (Federico Fellini, 1963)
-Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)
-Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982)
-The Godfather I (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
-Koyaanisquatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983)
-The Lives of Others (Florean Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
-A Month in the Country (Pat O'Connor, 1987)
-Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004)
-No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers, 2007)
-Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005)
-Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)
-The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
-The Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
-A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)
-The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)
-The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
-Waterwalker (Bill Mason, 1986)
-Witness (Peter Weir, 1985)

The Canadian Education Association has just released a study about Canadian teachers titled "Teaching the Way we Aspire to Teach: Now and in the Future": http://www.cea-ace.ca/publication/teaching-way-we-aspire-teach-now-and-future

Review of Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, by David F. Labaree

Book cover from Harvard University Press website: 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674050686

This past week I published an in-depth review of Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, a book of interrelated essays by Stanford University Professor of Education David F. Labaree, for H-Net's history of education network. You can access a PDF of the review here: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=34440.

Labaree's book divides into two parts. In the first of these he attempts to reconstruct the history of education reform in the United States in broad strokes from the 1630s in Boston to the close of the twentieth century, citing five major waves of reform: 

(1) the Common School Movement, pioneered in the early 1800s; 

(2) the Progressive movement, which prevailed from the late 1800s up to the 1950s; 

(3) the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; 

(4) the Standards and Standarization movements, set in motion in the 1980s and 1990s; 
(5) and finally the Choice movement, dating from the late 1990s and continuing today. 

The second part of his book is given over to exploring the syndrome Labaree calls 'educationalization,' the phenomenon by which the vast majority of Americans look to education as a means of resolving social problems. Schools alone, he concludes, cannot achieve such goals as enhancing social mobility, social equality, or social efficiency. 

In my review I redraw Labaree's historical narrative in miniature, while detailing his understanding of the limitations of American public schooling. I argue that his book is less about the limits of public schooling than it is about the limits of liberalism. Finally, I question whether the limits of liberalism, as far as America is concerned, are really relevant any longer, as the United States, it seems to me, is best characterized as a corporatocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy. 

Those interested in probing the issue of education reform and public schooling further should read American education historian Diane Ravitch's recent New York Review of Books articles:

"No Student Left Untested" 21 February 2012:
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/21/no-student-left-untested/

"Schools We Can Envy" 8 March 2012:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/schools-we-can-envy/?pagination=false

"How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools" 22 March 2012:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/how-and-how-not-improve-schools/?pagination=false

Harper's Magazine: The finest English-language general interest magazine

Earlier this week I finished reading the August 2011 issue of Harper’s Magazine (http://harpers.org/). True - four months is a long time to take to finish a single issue of a monthly magazine. In part, I’ve been too busy to read material not directly related to my working life. But mostly I took so long because I didn’t feel rushed. Harper's is simply a pleasure to savor. Further, months after publication its contents retain a remarkable currency. Indeed, the mainstream newspapers that I also read continue  referencing issues explored in Harper's months ago. Here, in any case, are some highlights from the August issue:


Petra Bartosiewicz’s “To Catch a Terrorist” will shock those not yet acquainted with the shadowy workings of the Intelligence world. For starters, Bartosiewicz’s reveals, only one person, according to U.S. Department of Justice records, has attempted to commit a terrorist act on American soil and been convicted since 9/11. At the same time the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) claims it has “amassed more than 1,000 federal ‘terrorism-associated’ prosecutions” during the same ten years. 


Why the totally divergent statistics? Because, Bartosiewicz explicitly states, the FBI is running a de facto ‘protection racket.’ Its details are unknown to most Americans or are otherwise classified on the grounds of 'national security.' It targets so-called ‘pre-terrorists,’ using informants (conscious, arms-length FBI allies) to rope so-called suspects (defined however the U.S. government wishes) into attempting terrorist acts, or else into merely associating with alleged terrorists, terrorist rhetoric, or loose terrorist networks. The article cites the telling example of the Miami Seven, an alleged terrorist cell said to have been busted by the FBI in 2006 for planning an attack on the Chicago Sears Tower. The plot, along with its rhetoric, as well as the opportunity for the attack, were all developed by two FBI informants. 


This pre-emptive ‘racket’, moreover, predominantly targets Muslims. Indeed, they are now essentially the exclusive target of U.S. Homeland Security terrorism-related Intelligence work. Most of this work is done at the ground level by U.S. Intelligence fusion centres, that integrate "all levels of law enforcement." The first was established in 2003. Clearly the central question this and similar scenarios raises is: Where exactly do terrorism investigations end, and terrorist acts begin? 


Ultimately, Bartosiewicz notes, today’s FBI is at liberty to “spy on whomever it wishes, for however long it wishes, even if that individual has never committed a crime or, more important, is not even suspected of one.” Further, though it is officially barred from the racial profiling of suspects, it remains otherwise free to pursue essentially the same ends through religious and/or nation-of-origin profiling. As well, Bartosiewicz adds: 


“Enhanced surveillance and wire-tapping powers initially passed under the PATRIOT Act can now be used against citizens who are merely ‘suspected of associating with radical activists’ … [including] left-leaning political protesters, whether anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, or anti-war.”


Presumably, this  includes participants in the Occupy movement that has swept American and international cities this fall?

There is so much more that I could say about the solid contents of the August 2011 issue of Harper's. In particular, don't miss Nathaniel Rich’s street-level exposé, “The Luckiest Woman on Earth: Three ways to win the lottery," about the almost certainly compromised Texas Lottery system. In what remains of this post though I will restrict myself to highlighting some key points made by Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell in "The Tomist," his review of American neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama’s new book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. 


Kingwell's review is noteworthy less for what it says about Fukuyama - the book earns a negative review for failing to take a discernible position – and more for its courage in naming politics as the sham that it is. “Institutions of politics,” Kingwell remarks, justify “the advantages of the few in terms that will be swallowed by the many.” Further, he notes, if they believe they must they will use force without justification to maintain those advantages if and when the otherwise reliable force of ideology (brainwashing, conditioning, material security and comforts) fails to maintain the status quo. Elsewhere, Kingwell succinctly spells out just what this system of advantages look like:

“[E]very political system known to history has been dedicated to some form or other of legitimated extortion: polls, taxes, fines, bribes, and rents, together with their financial-arms-race counterparts of evasion, loopholes, lawyers, and regulatory capture.”


Sound bleak? Perhaps, although as 2011 draws to a close and the wealth gap in most countries widens, one must seriously wonder and ponder.

First published in 1850, Harper’s www.harpers.org remains America’s second longest continuously running magazine after Scientific American, which, in any case, is only its senior by five years. As readily available in drug stores and gas station magazine stands as in Canada’s big box and independent bookstores, Harper’s may well be the English-speaking world’s most rewarding and well-balanced monthly read. Throughout its venerable one-hundred and sixty-one year publishing history, its pages, as Wikipedia notes, have offered up the writings of everyone from Herman Melville and Mark Twain in the nineteenth century, to Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath in the twentieth. During the past forty years its longest serving editor and contributor was Lewis H. Lapham, who stepped aside in 2006 to found a new publication known as Lapham’s Quarterly.

Continuous publication of Harper’s Magazine, as Wikipedia also notes, has been threatened on at least two notable occasions. The first instance was provoked by a perceived reactionary change in the magazine’s primary ownership, John Cowles, Jr., being the dominant backer at the time. A wave of high profile editorial and other resignations ensued, among them the well-known Norman Mailer and Bill Moyers. A second threat to the magazine’s publication transpired in the early 1980s, when the then majority controller Star Tribune announced that Harper’s would fold. In response, John R. MacArthur intervened, and with the help of several organizations established the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, which continues to publish the magazine today.  Today, in the words of Wikipedia writers, Harper’s remains a consistent and effective internal critic of American domestic and foreign policy.

Beyond all this, Harper’s is distinguished by a principled exercise of imaginative reason, a rare cosmopolitan ethos, and a uniquely tangible humanistic practice. Sober and insightful, its writers normally succeed in critiquing the increasingly mad world we inhabit without falling back on crude or rigid ideological positions. While this stance will disappoint committed Leftists, who will prefer the pages of Canadian Dimension or Z Magazine or Monthly Review, it has the undeniable virtue of enabling a forum in which a spectrum of readers can discourse and, yes, disagree, including social democrats, liberals, and even some conservatives. That being said, Harper’s has consistently published some of the most radical analyses and forward looking articles to appear on the mass market in North America in recent years. 

Becoming Dr. Strange: Thoughts on episode one of season four of CBC's Being Erica

Image: Screen shot of character Erica Strange (played by Erin Karpluk) from CBC's Being Erica; original shot posted at Britts On blog

I've long been a fan of the CBC's (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's) adult television drama Being Erica, now in its fourth season as of yesterday's new "Doctor Who?" episode (clever title).

"Doctor Who?" was challenging though. It left me, and probably most loyal viewers, with initially mixed feelings - as it surely was meant to. In today's post I attempt to understand my mixed fixings. The post presupposes long standing familiarity with the show though, so newbies may want to skip this entry.

To reiterate, the first episode of season four of Being Erica left me with mixed feelings. They were provoked by its surprising and arguably shocking plot and character twists, which may strike some as downright inauthentic. Not wishing to spoil the episode, all I ask is whether the show's writers are sacrificing the integrity of Erica's character in a now impatient attempt to drive the show's narrative logic home by season's end? I will try to answer this question by characterizing this logic as both spiritual and psychological, and by summing its operative belief system up as the necessity that each of us engage in a conscious struggle at becoming fully human. This humanizing process, the show emphasizes, is filled with both moments of joy and of pain. Yet growth ultimately leads the individual beyond the normal confines of the ego into a way of being that heals both the self and ultimately all else it encounters.

Heady stuff - for a prime time Canadian drama. 

But again, the question is whether the integrity of Erica's character is being subordinated to the show's spiritual and psychological logic? If so, it wouldn't be the first time character was subordinated to plot or theme in television history, as television characters often serve as  vehicles or foils for ideas or narrative twists. We may not approve, when this occurs. Yet, as experienced viewers, we are generally forgiving. After all, the medium of television is driven by fundamentally different forces than film or literature, for instance, are. We expect a good film or a literary novel to illuminate character and to subordinate narrative and conceptual concerns in the service of this imperative.

Now, despite my initial mixed feelings, it seems to me the often shocking plot and character twists in episode one of season four of Being Erica were justified. This is so because Erica is now a therapist training. Consequently, as her colourful therapist Dr. Tom puts it in the episode, her life now is driven by a new imperative: she must strive to become her patient. How is this to be accomplished? By surrendering the ego's self-regarding imperatives. This  permits both patient and therapist to experience a fully human encounter on equal footing. Or, to put the matter differently: Erica's character is rapidly converging with the show's narrative logic. Being Erica is about to become: Becoming Erica.

Being Erica: http://www.cbc.ca/beingerica/

Becoming Bruce: The Early Life & Work of Bruce Cockburn, by John A. McCurdy

Cover of Bruce Cockburn's May 1970 self-titled debut album.

Becoming Bruce: The Early Life & Work of Bruce Cockburn, by John A. McCurdy, Copyright 2010, an online book self-published at WordPress: http://johnamccurdy.wordpress.com/

For several years now I've formed the distinct impression that both fans as well as the general public have been living with Bruce Cockburn's music these past forty years without necessarily understanding his music in a conscious way. In this short book I try to remedy this perceived problem with respect to his early work.

The book is structured in the following way.

The contents of Chapters 2, 3, and 4, are primarily biographical. Together they reconstruct the story of Bruce's life as he himself has told it to so many journalists over the years, from his birth in 1945 to his first appearance as a truly established music artist at Toronto's Massey Hall in the spring of 1970. Virtually all the biographical material contained in these chapters has been carefully gleaned from interviews Bruce has given over the past forty plus years. Consequently, they present Bruce's early life and work as he has thus far offered it to the reading public. Wherever and whenever appropriate, I let Bruce speak for himself. A small portion of his biography is also presented in Chapter 6, principally the story of his marriage and earliest known Christian experience.

Chapter 5 offers an original narrative interpretation of Bruce's first album. (Copies of Bruce's debut are hard to come by today. It's possible to listen to the songs at the True North Records website http://www.truenorthrecords.com/Albums.php?album_id=14, though I must recommend that the reader acquire a copy of his or her own.)

My interpretation of his debut record rests on a central assumption: that Bruce carefully arranged and crafted the contents of his debut record to communicate autobiographical initiation narrative. This story, I argue, is one of initiation into an Eco-Christian world view, but one significantly that ushers in a vision not so much of an orthodox as of a pagan Christ. This Eco-Christian vision culminates, as Paul Nonnekes intimated in an earlier 2000 study of Bruce's lyrics, in an integral vision of earthly and heavenly harmony.

As Bruce sings in “Spring Song”:

“Seasons turning yet again / The Mother’s breast is full again / As in heaven, so with men / Is now and ever shall be.”

The attainment of an Eco-Christian culture, “Spring Song” insists, lies in shifting the seat of human consciousness from brain to heart. This is achieved by birthing and cultivating what seers and mystics have called ‘the eye of the heart': the fourth energy centre of the human body known otherwise as the heart chakra. As Bruce sings:

“When we come / When we come again / To celebrate renewal / At the heart / At the heart of us / Our eyes will touch life.”

In forwarding this claim, I wish to challenge the prevailing notion that Bruce's orthodox Christian material, dominant from 1974 to 1991, stands as the apex of his life work. What I would call the orthodox view regards his eclectic and syncretic early and late works as lacking Christian orthodoxy's imaginative clarity. By contrast, this book aims to show that Bruce's eclecticism and syncretism were once and are essentially once again his normative position as a music artist. By this measure, his bold though arguably brief orthodox mid-career period ought to be viewed instead as a significant temporary detour rather than as a defining feature of his work.

In short, Bruce Cockburn’s understanding of the human condition, it seems to me, is predominantly eclectic or syncretic. In this sense, his adult life and work constitutes a passionate inter-cultural quest, initiated when he was only in his teens, one that deepened during his years at Berklee School of Music in Boston in the mid-1960s.

One last point. Historically, Bruce has tended to be an unusually private Canadian icon. As early as 1976 journalist Patricia Holtz would point out just how shy he actually was. He cared, she insisted, “an extreme amount about his privacy," while the "whole idea of interviews seems to him like an unnecessary intrusion.” Bruce's private way of life will soon be challenged though by Bruce himself. In spring 2010, Bruce announced that he was planning to write a memoir, to be published in April 2010 by HarperOne and HarperCollinsCanada. As Bruce put the matter at a press conference at the time:

“‘... the notion that there should be a book about me has popped up now and then, along with offers to write it … It always seemed too soon, and I’ve felt all along that such a book should be mine to author. When HarperOne expressed their interest, it finally did seem timely ...’”

Further, Bruce's long standing manager, Bernie Finkelstein, has also announced the imminent publication of his own memoirs, set for release in the spring of 2012. There is no avoiding the fact that the looming appearance of Bruce's and Bernie's memoirs are virtually certain to alter the way we - myself included - understand the genesis, meaning, and significance of Bruce's early life and work.

In the meantime, I offer my book as a creative and competent reading of Bruce Cockburn's early life and work. Only time will tell if my reading of both will cohere with what Bruce himself has to say about himself.

Virtuosos of Rock: A Review of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010, 107 Min.), directed by Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen

Images: film poster (top); Rush, Toronto, mid-1970s (below)

For a Canadian like myself, there is some fascination in going to the local cinema to see a documentary film about a Canadian band whose three members hail from Willowdale, Ontario, a dull, non-descript Toronto suburb, and Hagersville, Ontario, otherwise famous for a tire fire. The band in question is Rush and has been based around the talents of the same three men since 1974: Geddy Lee on bass guitar, keyboards and lead vocals; Alex Lifeson on guitar; and Neil Peart on drums and percussion. Arguably Canada’s most commercially successful and best-known band of the past forty years, both at home and abroad, Rush also has the distinction of running afoul of critical opinion.

Enter Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, the new documentary by San Dunn and Scot McFadyen, which seems to be doing double duty: to please Rush’s legion of loyal long-time fans, on the one hand, while attempting to bring critics and new fans on side, on the other (http://www.rushbeyondthelightedstage.com/).

How successful is the film in achieving these aims? Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage is indeed a disarming film that makes for good viewing. This is partly because it utilizes a straightforward format, including a mix of chronological and thematic analysis. It also successfully humanises Lee, Lifeson and Peart. The portrait of Peart that emerges is especially personal. This is ironic, given his reputation for unsociable behaviour. This is also apt though, as Peart has been Rush’s principal lyricist – the band’s ideas man - for most of its existence. The twin tragedies Peart faced in the late 1990s, the deaths of his daughter and wife, are handled subtly and with dignity. And who can deny the film’s good-natured humour, invoked by the directors at just those moments when the program seems to be loosing steam?

Ultimately though, the film seems as much about artistic integrity as about Rush. The band is presented as the type of the defiant artist: unbending in the face of market dictates, faithful to its vision to the end. As Katherine Monk put the matter in the Vancouver Sun: "The boys are rendered as musical saints who were martyred on the industry cross for their beliefs." In this there is something of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, a work referenced directly in Rush's early work, a 1943 novel about an architect who remains true to his highest principles in the face of persecution and against all odds. The idea that Rush swam against the commercial stream is dubious though, and amounts to a romanticization of the band. It would be more accurate to say it remained in dialogue with the larger culture, embracing the synthesizer in the 1980s, for instance, as both a choice and as an affirmative nod in the direction of New Wave. Moreover, like so many other artists who got their big break in the 1970s – Neil Young comes to mind - Rush sought a synthesis of its previous styles in the 1990s. Essentially, the band rode the same waves as the rest of the music business, they just continued to surf in their own eccentric direction.

In addition to romanticizing Rush, Dunn and McFayden’s film fails to illuminate the process by which Lee, Lifeson and Peart advanced their musical abilities so fully and so early without apparent tutelage or extended apprenticeship. Leaving these details out feeds a related myth: that of the three boys with extraordinary ‘natural talent.' No doubt all three were largely natural musicians. Yet the viewer senses something has been left out. Surely Rush had teachers and mentors?

The film also arguably fails to penetrate the dense web of morphing ideas that fill Rush’s records. True, a number of the band's key ideas and more provocative lyrics are highlighted, but mostly in a spirit of curiosity or mute credulity. Even when the film allows avid fans to speak directly to the music, the results are mediocre: Rush’s music may be about the alienation of the individual from society, but if so the band is merely retelling the perennial story of rock and roll to a syncopated beat.

My own sense is that Rush is, first and foremost, a virtuoso band, a fact that renders them an immediate oddity, as virtuosos normally steer clear of rock and roll. This fact distinguishes Rush from most rock bands active today, with the exception of a handful of long standing progressive rock cousins. Some will argue Rush is an ideas band, or that their music is emotionally satisfying. I, however, cannot agree on these points, as it seems to me their music lacks warmth, soul, feel, and internal coherence. As Owen Gleiberman has put the matter in Entertainment Weekly: "They're the sound of all rock and no roll." There is something oddly – even eerily – unmusical about the sophisticated music made by Rush. Evocation of feeling and mood are no less a musical skill than the ability to write and perform in multiple time signatures. Two distinct gifts you say? But, then, what is the purpose of music: mere technical proficiency? Only when Rush adopted the economy of Pop in the 1980s, as Sting once described that genre’s central feature, did its music come to life. Yet one could make the case that Rush ceased to be Rush at precisely this moment.

The question as to whether or not Rush’s music has merit may ultimately be a moot point though. After all, they have enjoyed a long career and a consistent cult following that has assured them industry success, if not critical acceptance. Their musical skill is unquestioned, millions upon millions of units have been sold, and thousands of lives reputedly illuminated by their vast catalogue of songs. Indeed, the cinema theatre where I saw the film on opening night was packed to the backseats, if not with eager fans, than with a festive audience more than willing to celebrate Rush’s unusual achievement. Given these factors even a curmudgeonly critic has to ask him or herself if taste really matters in the end? Rock and roll, after all, is a business like any other.

Check out these reviews of Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage as well:

Linda Barnard, "Rush: Documentary Finds Nuance Amid Noise," Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/article/821254--rush-documentary-finds-nuance-amid-noise

Mike Devlin, “Canadian Filmmaking Duo Revels in Rush Job,” Times Colonist:
http://www.timescolonist.com/entertainment/Canadian+filmmaking+revels+Rush/3135273/story.html

Adam McDowell, “Rush: Sticking to the Formula,” National Post:
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/Rush+Sticking+formula/3132812/story.html
McDowell on Rush: “Peart’s lyric’s these days explore love, loss and learning. Moving closer to the heart has also taken rush further away from the head. They’re just not that strange anymore, and some fans may quietly feel the magic is fading every year.”

Katherine Monk, “Getting Closer to the Heart,” Vancouver Sun:
http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Getting+closer+heart+Rush/3135389/story.html

Jim Slotek, “‘Rush’ Doc Doesn’t Care for Cool,” Toronto Sun:
http://www.torontosun.com/entertainment/movies/2010/06/09/14322801.html
Jordan Zivitz, “Closer to Their Heart,” Montreal Gazette:
http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Closer+their+heart/3137651/story.html

Owen Gleiberman, film review, Entertainment Weekly: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20392434,00.html